Time is the Last Thing Obama Needs

The convention pleas of Barack Obama for more time to fix the economy sounded more like begging for mercy than a plan of action. Only someone with a completely numbed brain who hadn’t been paying attention for the past four years could have fallen for it.

Naturally, the Democrat faithful lapped it up.

King Obama has already had too much time to fix the economy, as Friday’s unemployment numbers showed.

The Democrats’ demagogic faith in their “tax ’em to help ’em” strategy has kept the country at above 8 percent unemployment for 43 months. During that time, millions of unemployed people have given up hope of ever finding another job and dropped out of the labor pool entirely.

According to the American Enterprise Institute, if the labor pool included the same number of people today that it did when Obama first entered office, the unemployment rate today would be over 11 percent, not hovering just above 8 percent.

In a very real way, Mr. Hope and Change has benefited from Americans’ loss of hope that the economic picture will change.

The just-released figures for unemployment in August are a perfect example. The headlines have touted the creation of 93,000 jobs, but far more people lost jobs during the month, 119,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Just to keep up with population growth, the U.S. economy needs to create between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs net per month.

Because 368,000 people fled the labor force in August, shrinking the pool included by the government in its figures, the unemployment rate “shrank” to 8.1 percent.

The more people give up, the better the numbers look for Obama, who has accomplished nothing substantial in his first four years of “fixing” the economy.

If the labor pool continues to shrink under Obama’s and the Democrats’ misguidance, at some point there will be nothing left to fix.